SellNSendA picture perfect example of outstanding online success

Company Overview

Located in Centennial, Colorado, near Denver, SellNSend and its sister site AvidMax Outfitters are online retailers of outdoor activity gear and photography equipment. Priding itself on providing the best customer service possible, SellNSend has built a loyal audience of outdoor and photography enthusiasts. This bodes well for the SellNSend employees as they too are avid outdoorsmen and often find their office filled with the bicycles they rode to work.

The Situation

At its inception five years ago, SellNSend was slated to be a consignment store on eBay, according to co-founder Neal Davidson. It was at an eBay Live conference that Davidson discovered ChannelAdvisor and shortly thereafter implemented Marketplaces. Unfortunately, Davidson was concerned with the growing pains both his company and ChannelAdvisor were experiencing at the time, so he left ChannelAdvisor for a competitor after a couple years.

For Davidson, however, the grass was not greener on the other side, and ChannelAdvisor made some serious service commitments to win back SellNSend’s business. Davidson signed back on with ChannelAdvisor within a year, this time with Marketplaces and Digital Marketing.

The Solution

This time around, SellNSend implemented ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces for Amazon, eBay, Newegg and Rakuten.com Shopping. “We were on Amazon, but we were having problems listing products and managing them,” said Davidson.

Davidson used the Product Match feature to automate his product listings, determine which Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) he should use and discover whether or not Amazon is a competitor for that product.

“With ChannelAdvisor Marketplaces, listing errors are automatically reported along with intelligent recommendations to fix the errors. We can now quickly assess how Amazon categorizes our products and make sure they are listed accurately, which has been a game-changer for our Amazon business,” continued Davidson.

Davidson is now able to list the same inventory across all marketplaces, and when a product goes out of stock, it’s removed from all channels. Davidson can maximize his audience with no fear of overselling. “It’s a life-saver having the ability to manage one inventory bucket across all channels,” Davidson stressed.

With its marketplaces strategy underway, SellNSend now needed to drive traffic to its sites with paid search campaigns. Davidson began working with ChannelAdvisor to evaluate SellNSend’s paid search strategy. “This allowed us to bypass the growing pains of adding a new channel and gave us the flexibility to beef up our paid search strategy” said Davidson. “Using ChannelAdvisor Digital Marketing has increased our revenue.”

The Results

“During initial talks with ChannelAdvisor, the team kept reiterating the ‘scalability’ of their solutions. At the time we were solely concerned with getting everything up and running; however, as I look back now at all the products and categories we’ve been able to add—without adding more headcount—we’ve seen significant growth as the result of having software that managed our e-commerce activity,” said Davidson.

“We’re now in a position where we can grow dramatically with very little effort, both in terms of volume and adding new products and new categories, and we have ChannelAdvisor to thank for that.”